If you've been following the recent announcements in this forum you should know that Jay Young (j_ung) was recently appointed to take over the reigns of rockclimbing.com from me. The complete transition will take a number of months, however Jay will assume the role of "community leader" right away. This means that Jay will henceforth:

1. Be the public face and mouthpiece of Rockclimbing.com and its owners to the public and users of the site; 2. Provide leadership to the group of moderators and editors; 3. Carry the final responsibility for setting the tone and enforcing the community rules on the site, working closely with the moderators and editors.

I will remain closely involved, but my focus will shift more to the "behind-the-scenes" activities of responding to technical issues, managing the site infrastructure, content and so forth. I will also stay on as moderator and admin for the site. Over time my involvement will become less and less as Jay continues to ramp up and I gradually transition all responsibility to him and NameMedia.

It's almost unbelievable to me that I've managed Rockclimbing.com for more than 3 years. It's been a great experience in so many ways, and despite the occasional bump in the road it's all worthwhile in the end. Thank you to a selfless team of volunteers who offered their time and dedication, and kept me honest all along. And thanks to all of you, the users, who hung out here, supported, complained, criticized, encouraged, and ultimately participated in keeping the essence of rockclimbing.com alive.

You know DDT, this repetitive switching of figureheads of whom we aim to torment has been very stressful on the BET. It takes a lot of work to develop new tag lines and bomz, and if you keep changing overlords on us every couple of weeks we're going to have to recruit new personnel. Hell, we just finally got our proofs back for the Name_Media bomz - those can go straight into the trash.

We tried to get a jump on this one. When we heard early rumors that J_ung was taking over we had a whole line of high quality glossy bomz all printed out and ready to rip. BUT NOBODY TOLD US HE WAS GOING TO BE BLUE. Now they're all worthless; hard work down the drain. *Sigh* You really have no idea how tough these past few weeks have been on all us BET-ers.